by Neil Clarke
Sensing me, the figure turned. The yellow light caught her.
“Ten,” I said. I saw fifty emotions on that face. Then she ran at me and I dropped the scanner and I lifted her and held her to me and no words of mine, or anyone else’s, I think, can say how I felt then.
Now our lives and stories and places come together, and my tale moves to its conclusion.
I believe that people and their feelings write themselves on space and time. That is the only way I can explain how I knew, even before I turned and saw him there in that camp, that it was Sean, that he had searched for me, and found me. I tell you, that is something to know that another person has done for you. I saw him, and it was like the world had set laws about how it was to work for me, and then suddenly it said, no. I break them now, for you, Tendeléo, because it pleases me. He was impossible, he changed everything I knew, he was there.
Too much joy weeps. Too much sorrow laughs.
He took me back to his hotel. The staff looked hard at me as he picked up his keycard from the lobby. They knew what I was. They did not dare say anything. The white men in the bar also turned to stare. They too knew the meaning of the colors I wore.
He took me to his room. We sat on the verandah with beer. There was a storm that night—there is a storm most nights, up in the high country—but it kept itself in the west among the Nandi Hills. Lightning crawled between the clouds, the distant thunder rattled our beer bottles on the iron table. I told Sean where I had been, what I had done, how I had lived. It was a story long in the telling. The sky had cleared, a new day was breaking by the time I finished it. We have always told each other stories, and each other’s stories.
He kept his questions until the end. He had many, many of them.
“Yes, I suppose, it is like the old slave underground railroads,” I answered one.
“I still don’t understand why they try to stop people going in.”
“Because we scare them. We can build a society in there that needs nothing from them. We challenge everything they believe. This is the first century we have gone into where we have no ideas, no philosophies, no beliefs. Buy stuff, look at stuff. That’s it. We are supposed to build a thousand years on that? Well, now we do. I tell you, I’ve been reading, learning stuff, ideas, politics. Philosophy. It’s all in there. There are information storage banks the size of skyscrapers, Sean. And not just our history. Other people, other races. You can go into them, you can become them, live their lives, see things through their senses. We are not the first. We are part of a long, long chain, and we are not the end of it. The world will belong to us; we will control physical reality as easily as computers control information.”
“Hell, never mind the UN . . . you scare me, Ten!”
I always loved it when he called me Ten. Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.
Then he said, “And your family?”
“Little Egg is in a place called Kilandui. It’s full of weavers, she’s a weaver. She makes beautiful brocades. I see her quite often.”
“And your mother and father?”
“I’ll find them.”
But to most of his questions, there was only one answer: “Come, and I will show you.” I left it to last. It rocked him as if he had been struck.
“You are serious.”
“Why not? You took me to your home once. Let me take you to mine. But first, it’s a year . . . And so so much . . .”
He picked me up.
“I like you in this combat stuff,” he said.
We laughed a lot and remembered old things we had forgotten. We slowly shook off the rust and the dust, and it was good, and I remember the room maid opening the door and letting out a little shriek and going off giggling.
Sean once told me that one of his nation’s greatest ages was built on those words, why not? For a thousand years Christianity had ruled England with the question: “Why?” Build a cathedral, invent a science, write a play, discover a new land, start a business: “why?” Then came the Elizabethans with the answer: “Why not?”
I knew the old Elizabethan was thinking, why not? There are only numbers to go back to, and benefit traps, and an old, gray city, and an old, gray dying world, a safe world with few promises. Here there’s a world to be made. Here there’s a future of a million years to be shaped. Here there are a thousand different ways of living together to be designed, and if they don’t work, roll them up like clay and start again.
I did not hurry Sean for his answer. He knew as well as I that it was not a clean decision. It was lose a world, or lose each other. These are not choices you make in a day. So, I enjoyed the hotel. One day I was having a long bath. The hotel had a great bathroom and there was a lot of free stuff you could play with, so I abused it. I heard Sean pick up the phone. I could not make out what he was saying, but he was talking for some time. When I came out he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the telephone beside him. He sat very straight and formal.
“I called Jean-Paul,” he said. “I gave him my resignation.”
Two days later, we set out for the Chaga. We went by matatu. It was a school holiday, the Peugeot Services were busy with children on their way back to their families. They made a lot of noise and energy. They looked out the corners of their eyes at us and bent together to whisper. Sean noticed this.
“They’re talking about you,” Sean said.
“They know what I am, what I do.”
One of the schoolgirls, in a black and white uniform, understood our English. She fixed Sean a look. “She is a warrior,” she told him. “She is giving us our nation back.”
We left most of the children in Kapsabet to change onto other matatus; ours drove on into the heart of the Nandi Hills. It was a high, green, rolling country, in some ways like Sean’s England. I asked the driver to stop just past a metal cross that marked some old road death.
“What now?” Sean said. He sat on the small pack I had told him was all he could take.
“Now, we wait. They won’t be long.”
Twenty cars went up the muddy red road, two trucks, a country bus and medical convoy went down. Then they came out of the darkness between the trees on the other side of the road like dreams out of sleep: Meji, Naomi and Hamid. They beckoned; behind them came men, women, children . . . entire families, from babes in arms to old men; twenty citizens, appearing one by one out of the dark, looking nervously up and down the straight red road, then crossing to the other side.
I fived with Meji; he looked Sean up and down.
“This is the one?”
“This is Sean.”
“I had expected something, um . . .”
“Whiter?”
He laughed. He shook hands with Sean and introduced himself. Then Meji took a tube out of his pocket and covered Sean in spray. Sean jumped back, choking.
“Stay there, unless you want your clothes to fall off you when you get inside,” I said.
Naomi translated this for the others. They found it very funny. When he had immunized Sean’s clothes, Meji sprayed his bag.
“Now, we walk,” I told Sean.
We spent the night in the Chief’s house in the village of Senghalo. He was the last station on our railroad. I know from my Dust Girl days you need as good people on the outside as the inside. Folk came from all around to see the black Englishman. Although he found being looked at intimidating, Sean managed to tell his story. I translated. At the end the crowd outside the Chief’s house burst into spontaneous applause and finger-clicks.
“Aye, Tendeléo, how can I compete?” Meji half-joked with me.
I slept fitfully that night, troubled by the sound of aircraft moving under the edge of the storm.
“Is it me?” Sean said.
“No, not you. Go back to sleep.”
Sunlight through the bamboo wall woke us. While Sea
n washed outside in the bright, cold morning, watched by children curious to see if the black went all the way down, Chief and I tuned his shortwave to the UN frequencies. There was a lot of chatter in Klingon. You Americans think we don’t understand Star Trek?
“They’ve been tipped off,” Chief said. We fetched the equipment from his souterrain. Sean watched Hamid, Naomi, Meri and I put on the communicators. He said nothing as the black-green knob of cha-plastic grew around the back of my head, into my ear, and sent a tendril to my lips. He picked up my staff.
“Can I?”
“It won’t bite you.”
He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.
“It’s a buckyball,” I said. “The symbol of our power.”
He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them, and set off. We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.
“They’re getting closer.”
Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two year old . . . Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.
“We choose a different path every time,” he said. “They can’t know this.”
“Someone’s selling us,” Meji said.
“Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.”
“Unless they’re covering them all.”
In the afternoon we began to dip down toward the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.
“They’re playing with us,” Hamid said. “They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.”
“How?” Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.
“I think I know,” Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. “This.” He tapped my forearm. “If I could find you, they can find you.”
I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.
“Hold my wrist,” I said to Sean. “Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.”
Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.
“I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,” Sean said.
Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth, and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.
Ten had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.
“Shone!” she shouted back. “Come with me!”
She ran up through the thinning trees to the summit. I followed, went bounding down a slight dip, and suddenly, the trees opened and I was on the edge.
The ground fell away at my feet into the Rift Valley, green on green on green, sweeping to the valley floor where the patterns of the abandoned fields could still be made out in the patchwork of yellows and buffs and earth tones. Perspective blurred the colors—I could see at least fifty miles—until, suddenly, breathtakingly, they changed. Browns and dry-land beiges blended into burgundies and rust reds, were shot through with veins of purple and white, then exploded into chaos, like a bed of flowers of every conceivable color, a jumble of shapes and colors like a mad coral reef, like a box of kiddie’s plastic toys spilled out on a Chinese rug. It strained the eyes, it hurt the brain. I followed it back, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. A sheer wall, deep red, rose abruptly out of the chaotic landscape, straight up, almost as high as the escarpment I was standing on. It was not a solid wall; it looked to me to be made up of pillars or, I thought, tree trunks. They must have been of titanic size to be visible from this distance. They opened into an unbroken, flat, crimson canopy. In the further distance, the flat roof became a jumble of dark greens, broken by what I can only describe as small mesas, like the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the old volcanoes in Puy de Dome. But these glittered in the sun like glass. Beyond them, the landscape was striped like a tiger, yellow and dark brown, and formations like capsizing icebergs, pure white, lifted out of it. And beyond that, I lost the detail, but the colors went on and on, all the way to the horizon.
I don’t know how long I stood, looking at the Chaga. I lost all sense of time. I became aware at some point that Ten was standing beside me. She did not try to move me on, or speak. She knew that the Chaga was one of these things that must just be experienced before it can be interpreted. One by one the others joined us. We stood in a row along the bluffs, looking at our new home.
Then we started down the path to the valley below.
Half an hour down the escarpment, Meji up front called a halt.
“What is it?” I asked Ten. She touched her fingers to her communicator; a half-eggshell of living plastic unfolded from the headset and pressed itself to her right eye.
“This is not good,” she said. “Smoke, from Menengai.”
“Menengai?”
“Where we’re going. Meji is trying to raise them on the radio.”
I looked over Ten’s head to Meji, one hand held to his ear, looking around him. He looked worried.
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“And what do we do?”
“We go on.”
We descended through microclimates. The valley floor was fifteen degrees hotter than the cool, damp Nandi Hills. We toiled across brush and overgrown scrub, along abandoned roads, through deserted villages. The warriors held their weapons at the slope. Ten regularly scanned the sky with her all-seeing eye. Now even I could see the smoke, blowing toward us on a wind from the east, and smell it. It smelled like burned spices. I could make out Meji trying to call up Menengai. Radio silence.
In the early afternoon, we crossed terminum. You can see these things clearly from a distance. At ground level, they creep up on you. I was walking through tough valley grasses and thorn scrub when I noticed lines of blue moss between the roots. Oddly regular lines of moss, that bent and forked at exactly one hundred and twenty degrees, and joined up into hexagons. I froze. Twenty meters ahead of me, Ten stood in one world . . . I stood in another.
“Even if you do nothing, it will still come to you,” she said. I looked down. The blue lines were inching toward my toes. “Come on.” Ten reached out her hand. I took it, and she led me across. Within two minutes’ walk, the scrub and grass had given way entirely to Chaga vegetation. For the rest of the afternoon we moved through the destroying zone. Trees crashed around us, shrubs were devoured from the roots down, grasses
fell apart and dissolved; fungus fingers and coral fans pushed up on either side, bubbles blew around my head. I walked through it untouched like a man in a furnace.
Meji called a halt under an arch of Chaga-growth like a vault in a medieval cathedral. He had a report on his earjack.
“Menengai has been attacked.”
Everyone started talking, asking questions, jabbering. Meji held up his hand. “They were Africans. Someone had provided them with Chaga-proof equipment, and weapons. They had badges on their uniforms: KLA.”
“Kenyan Liberation Army,” the quiet one, Naomi, said.
“We have enemies,” the clever one, Hamid, said. “The Kenyan Government still claims jurisdiction over the Chaga. Every so often, they remind us who’s in charge. They want to keep us on the run, stop us getting established. They’re nothing but contras with western money and guns and advisers.”
“And Menengai?” I asked. Meji shook his head.
“Most High is bringing the survivors to Ol Punyata.”
I looked at Ten.
“Most High?”
She nodded.
We met up with Most High under the dark canopy of the Great Wall. It was an appropriately somber place for the meeting: the smooth soaring trunks of the trees; the canopy of leaves, held out like hands, a kilometer over our heads; the splashes of light that fell through the gaps to the forest floor; survivors and travelers, dwarfed by it all. Medieval peasants must have felt like this, awestruck in their own cathedrals.